Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has invited President Donald Trump to visit Ukraine, “to come and to see” for himself the destruction and violence that Russia’s war in the country has wrought.
Speaking in a “60 Minutes” interview on CBS News recorded Friday and aired Sunday, Zelensky said he’d host Trump in Ukraine “with pleasure.”
“You think you understand what’s going on here. Okay, we respect your position,” Zelensky said, speaking briefly in English. “But please, before any kind of decisions, any kind of forms of negotiations, come to see people, civilians, warriors, hospitals, churches, children, destroyed or dead. Come, look, and then let’s move with a plan how to finish the war.”
He was echoing an invitation he has extended before, including during the tense Oval Office meeting between the leaders on Feb. 28.
“Have you ever been to Ukraine that you see what problems we have? Come once,” Zelensky asked Vice President JD Vance at the meeting. Vance responded, “I’ve actually watched and seen the stories, and I know what happens is you bring people, you bring them on a propaganda tour, Mr. President.”
In his “60 Minutes” appearance, Zelensky appeared to respond directly to that accusation: “We will not prepare anything. It will not be theater,” he said. “We don’t do this. We don’t need it.”
Taylor Van Kirk, Vance’s press secretary, said in a statement Monday that the vice president “repeatedly said that this war was not justified to begin with and is the product of Joe Biden’s weakness and incompetence.”
“Instead of mischaracterizing Vice President Vance’s rhetoric, President Zelensky should be focused on bringing this conflict to a peaceful conclusion. His comments are counterproductive to the goal of achieving peace for his country.”
About two hours after the interview aired, Trump blasted “60 Minutes” on Truth Social, calling it “not a ‘News Show.’”
“This Weekend’s ‘BROADCAST’ tops them all,” he wrote, calling out the segment on Ukraine and another on Greenland. He said he hoped the Federal Communications Commission, as headed by “its Highly Respected Chairman, Brendan Carr, will impose the maximum fines and punishment.”
“CBS is out of control, at levels never seen before, and they should pay a big price for this,” he said.
Asked by CBS reporter Scott Pelley about Trump calling Zelensky a “dictator without elections” and saying Ukraine started the war, Zelensky said that rhetoric was a sign that “sadly, Russian narratives are prevailing” in the United States. “How is it possible to witness our losses and our suffering, to understand what the Russians are doing, and to still believe that they are not the aggressors, that they did not start this war?”
The war in Ukraine would not have happened “if the 2020 Presidential Election was not RIGGED,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Monday, repeating false claims he has made previously. “President Zelenskyy and Crooked Joe Biden did an absolutely horrible job in allowing this travesty to begin.”
Zelensky told “60 Minutes” that he wanted to believe that the U.S. and Ukraine remained strong partners but that the matter has come into doubt as the U.S. has appeared to drift away from its established role in Europe. “I think without the United States, we will suffer great losses. Human and territorial,” he said, a prospect he said he did not want to consider.
The same day the interview aired, a Russian missile strike hit the downtown area of the northeastern Ukrainian city of Sumy, killing at least 34 people, including two children, Ukrainian officials said.